Lucky #13

Today marks my 13th anniversary at OmniTI. It’s a cliche, but the time really does fly. It’s always difficult to reflect on past years (especially when there are so many of them), which would probably explain why I haven’t had a 5 or 10 year anniversary posts. This time (mainly because 13 seems like a good number), instead of attempting to try to recap more than a decade worth of events, I decided to list some things that kept me here for that long.

People. Starting with another cliche here, but the people I’ve had a pleasure working with (both as peers and clients) are amazing. Thought leaders in the industry, pioneers of their craft, even some legends. Yup. Gene f@#$%ing Kranz. ’nuff said.

Projects. I’ve had a somewhat unique opportunity to design and build systems that run some of the most visited websites in the world. I’ve managed an application doing behavioral analytics and targeting on 50+ million of users at the turn of the century, before the term “Big Data” was a buzzword. I’ve witnessed how the code I cranked out over night supports 1000% traffic spikes from major media events without crashing and burning. That’s pretty damn cool.

Brands. The flip side of actual engineering is the social aspect of insight into operations of companies that you see on TV and billboards every day. From overseeing start up‘s evolution from a concept to a brand name, to having a chance to impact operations of a multi-billion dollar company, the experience and the perspective is invaluable.

Technology. And last, but not least, the technology itself. For someone like myself, who loves to get my hands on as many toys as possible, any job where Vice President of the company can start a day by digging through CSS and end it with troubleshooting network latency, touching 3 programming languages, 2 databases, and a number of supporting technologies in between, cannot be that bad.

As with everything, the years have not been without challenges (let my grey hair be the witness). There have been many sleepless nights, tight (read: impossible) deadlines, unexpected (the best kind) setbacks and even “the world’s longest Monday”tm. Still, the things I get to be involved in outweigh the challenges that come along with them. At least they have for the past 13 years. So here’s to many more years of great experiences. Cheers!